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by Johnatan Mullis, The Ohio State University

Abstract

Italian leftists in the twenty-first century often remark that the Left is dead, and problematise their own complicity with Neoliberal politics and its influence on contemporary culture and society. Leftist anxieties about the seeming impossibility of dissent in contemporary Italy surface in the narrative convention of confession in Roberto Andò’s film Le confessioni, Cristian Ceresoli’s dramatic monologue La Merda and Walter Siti’s novel Resistere non serve a niente. The unique form of confession operative in these works is distinct from its Catholic iteration, as well as that of its secular counterpart, the psychotherapeutic ‘confession.’ It constitutes a narrativizing of the self in which the life story appropriates touchstones of Neoliberal market logics, and posits the subject as an entrepreneur. The article argues that confession is a type of work, what Michael Hardt calls affective labour, that positions these works’ protagonists as complicit with these Neoliberal logics.